Michael Lynn
The researcher who quit his job so he could give his Cisco router talk at Black Hat 2005 — and watched twenty pages get torn out of the conference book.
Lynn worked at Internet Security Systems and had shown that a heap overflow in Cisco's IOS could be turned into code execution on a router. Until then routers were widely assumed to be practically immune to that class of attack; a working exploit against the internet's backbone was a different matter from a crash. The bug had already been patched, but not everyone had applied the fix.
Ahead of Black Hat in Las Vegas in July 2005, ISS pulled the talk under pressure from Cisco. Lynn resigned and gave it anyway. Conference staff were set to ripping the presentation out of the printed proceedings, Cisco and ISS obtained a restraining order against further distribution, and the slides turned up online regardless. The affair, often called Ciscogate, became a textbook case of suppression making things louder.